Finally got my balls installed....

It's so nice to finally have them up where they belong.

They had been waiting to come outside for MONTHS!!!

And now they are finally happy.

Back Door Before and After

I recently finished painting the back door and the trim that Doug finally put up. He took the door off so that I could do a really good job and he also repaired the deadbolt area where the firemen had broken in. I sure wish I'd thought to leave the door open or unlocked when I was leaving, but who thinks of such things at a time like that? Anyway, on the "before" picture below, you can still see what remains of the CONDEMNED sign that they stuck on the door the next day. Officially, our house is still condemned, although it doesn't look like it should be anymore.


Below is the "after" picture. The medium blue looks nicer with the blue ceiling than the faded dark green did. You can click on the picture to get a closer look. I'm very happy with how the threshold turned out too. I stained it with Cabot solid stain in a color called Spruce Blue. It sort of matches the green slate just inside the door.

This was the first time I had ever stained anything and it was actually pretty fun, especially since it ended up looking so nice. You can see a picture of it on the previous post. Now I'm thinking about staining the porch floor a light blue at some point. I think you are supposed to wait a year before staining pressure treated boards, so I'll wait. We still need to get the baseboard trim done anyway.



Here's a closeup of the trim around the outside of the door frame. Doug is glad that I talked him into putting it on now that he sees how nice it looks, and now that a few of his friends have complimented him on it. He did a great job with the reveal as well.

And in other news, here are the two rooms at the front of the house on the main floor that I recently painted. I'm pretty pleased with the way all of the different colors intersect. I guess I'll be decorating based on wall color rather than the other way around!

The colors are Faded Seafoam for the piano room, Wisteria for the foyer, and Sour Lime for the living room. Wild, huh?

Next up will be the completed front porch, balls and all. Stay tuned.....

more painting and staining

Today I stained the threshold to the back door and I'm very pleased at how it turned out. I'm so glad I didn't paint it. The wood grain looks kind of wild in this sort of grayish blue-green. I can't wait to reinstall the door. It's going to look so pretty in its new shade of blue.


I spent most of the weekend sanding the walls and doing other prep work for the last two rooms on the main floor that need to be painted. This morning I finished the cut-in painting in the foyer. I'm excited about this color. It's a medium purplish blue called "Wisteria" and I think it will be a nice contrast to the rooms that it is adjacent to. And when the front door is open the combination of the two colors is similar to the colors you see in a hydrangea bush. Hmmm......


I'll post some pictures of the finished rooms withing the next couple of days, I hope.

Possible Mouldings for our Kitchen

While Doug's away, Cyndy will play - with power tools! HaHaHa!!! Usually I avoid these things like the plague because they can be dangerous to your hands and I need my hands. But I decided to save a whole lot of decision-making time by constructing a few mockups of potential moulding for our kitchen cabinets.

We were planning to use a copy of the original crown moulding from our old house to go around the tops of all the cabinets. Doug really want to use it in the kitchen for sentimental reasons. But the other day, he got started putting it up and we realized it didn't look good because the recessed lights cause the moulding to completely cast a shadow upon itself. So we'll just use it somewhere else instead. There are plenty of places it could go.

I remembered the experience with making the vent pipe covering and decided to get things moving by doing a sample of what I had in mind myself. That way when Doug gets back from his trip it won't take as long to get it done because all of the discussions will have already taken place.

My original idea was just to use a piece of half-round. It would look neat and clean and simple. But the sizes I bought were not big enough to look right so I ended up splitting a wooden closet rod in half. That one was so easy to make that I decided to get fancy and play around with the other sizes of half round. The second one I made is a flat trim board with small half-round beads on the top and bottom. Then just for laughs, I made another one that was three pieces of half-round attached to a trim board.

After the glue was dry I cut them with the miter saw and glued the two mitered ends together on each one. I couldn't find the staple gun or the finish nailer so I just used glue to put them together. I primed and painted them last night and this morning I put them up to see how they'd look.

#1

#2

#3

#1

#2


#3 - that's just silly!


#2 on the left, #1 on the right

different angle - #2 on the left, #1 on the right

When I first made #3 I was laughing because I thought it looked like Lincoln Logs, if you're old enough to know what I'm talking about. Then yesterday as I was driving home from my gig, I saw this and it just made me feel like mocking #3 even more.

If you think they all look bad, please don't hesitate to tell me, because the other option is to go with no trim at all. Except that then the stupid outlets for Doug's recessed rope lighting will show.

tile, fans, and trim

So what have we been up to lately? We finally finished putting up the ceiling in the back porch. That was a job and a half, or more actually. It took forever, but it looks really nice.

The tile people came and did our kitchen backsplash. So all that's left in the kitchen is putting on the Bona Traffic floor protection, the moulding around the tops of the cabinets, and the baseboards.

That's Doug's sink above. He can be as messy as he wants there because I have my very own sink too. The company that makes it named it "Orca" because it's so huge.

I selected all of my knobs and pulls and they all arrived last week. I'll be installing them very soon I hope.

I finally found a fan style that Doug LOVES and which also satisfied my need for a low profile light. I got talked into having a fan with a light, which I have never liked the idea of because I think most of them are ugly for one thing, and nobody would believe how much lower the ceiling would end up feeling until we actually installed a fan last week that the fan store guy had talked us (Doug mostly) into buying. It was completely unacceptable so we meticulously repacked it and took it back.

This is what I found instead and Doug immediately latched onto it and found a couple of new ones on eBay. It's a little more modern than the general style of the rest of our porch, but it's plain enough that I think it will look okay. It looks an awful lot like an airplane propeller but the light at the bottom is great and doesn't stick out at all.

It cost a bit more than we were planning to spend, especially since we needed two of them. I'd been planning to buy a cheap brown fan for my bass room which would match the ceiling lights, but after we spent all that money on the fancy fans for the back porch I decided to paint a fan that Doug just so happened to have. He bought it twenty years ago, and it was still new in the box. He doesn't remember why he bought it. He's a hoarder so he probably bought it because it might come in handy one day. This time he was right!

This was a very inexpensive project. I had a can of rustoleum that I was going to use to paint some ceiling light trim that happened to be the right color. I also had a can of brown paint that I'd been thinking about using for the window trim in the pass through of the kitchen. It was in the reject section of the paint department at Home Depot and it only cost a dollar. The color is perfect, but I got my money's worth on the paint quality. Behr paint is absolute crap, or at least the paint in this can was. I'm glad I was only using it for fan blades! Anyway that fan is going to look pretty awesome for only a dollar more than the cost of a can of Rustoleum.

This week we've been putting up the trimwork on the back porch which is a very slow and tedious process. Oh, and I've mowed the grass twice in the past two weeks. Nothing new there.

That's what I'm talking about

We got half of the porch ceiling panels installed today.

Using this contraption which is called a drywall lift.

porch ceiling and powder room

On Monday we installed the first of the twelve porch ceiling panels. This involved me standing up on a ladder holding the 4x8 sheet of beaded plywood with my head mostly, but using my two hands to balance it against the rafters while Doug screwed it in place from the stepladder. The aqua/faded seafoam color looks really nice against the gray siding. I'll try to get a picture of it sometime soon.

Yesterday we attempted to put the next panel in place and this time I had to try to hold the panel up while standing on a wobbly stepladder. This did not work out, so we've borrowed our friend Buc's drywall lift again (my suggestion) and it should be much easier and more efficient to get the rest of the ceiling attached this way. Those panels are kind of heavy for just the two of us to deal with on a high ceiling that has quite a bit of slope to it.

Meanwhile, Doug saved the day with our powder room lighting problem. I had decided that a shorter version of the pendants in our kitchen would look really cute in the powder room. We've been using a lot of fixtures from this one series from Kichler in an attempt to get some consistency happening in all of the main parts of our house.

The pendants work perfectly over the island in the kitchen because they hang pretty much at eye level. Unfortunately in the bathroom the bulb was visible and the glare was horrible. We tried a bunch of different light bulbs and nothing worked, so I was starting to look into replacing the shade when Doug presented me with a globe that he had rescued from the basement of the old part of our house that we had to tear down. It had been sitting there in the basement the entire time we lived there and I guess the previous owners had removed it when they did their "country colonial" redecorating, probably in the late 1960's. This globe looks like it might be from the early 1900s.

I really like the fact that we now have an especially old piece of our old house incorporated into our new house, and look how cute it looks! It's even more adorable than it was with the scalloped shade. I think it looks kind of like an earring.

What I did on Tuesday instead of selling my bass....

Tuesday was a freakishly productive day. It started off with a call to my luthier in New York to cancel an appointment to put my spare bass on consignment which I had made just the day before. After he heard me playing it one last time on Monday night, Doug told me that I should really keep it and not think about selling it any more. I feel selfish keeping it because we need the money, but we have other things we can sell.

So I didn't drive up to New York. The weather was completely fantastic so I decided to get started painting the porch ceiling panels, a project I was NOT looking forward to at all. I was planning to paint each panel one by one on the porch, which would have taken days, but the weather was so nice that it made sense to do it out in the back yard. And since there was so much more space out there, it made even more sense to paint all 12 of them at once! So I decided to go for it.

First I set up some stuff to elevate them out of the grass slightly, and then I carried them all out there using one of those magic plywood carrying handles. I'm really glad it wasn't windy. It wasn't too bad carrying them that way, but my hands did hurt the next day. They are fine now.

After I finished all of the backpriming and the paint was dry enough, I flipped them all over and began to realize that there really wasn't enough time to finish painting all 768 square feet of paneling by myself by the end of the day. So Doug graciously offered to postpone his annual car vacation by a day in order to help me finish. It doesn't start until Saturday anyway.

So we primed the beaded part and got the finish coat on in just enough time for it to be dry enough to carry back onto the porch. And Doug carried them all back in while I gathered up the rest of the stuff. He's definitely in my good graces right now. And he'll stay there if we can install them on the ceiling as soon as he gets back from his trip!

They are blue because it is traditional for porch ceilings on old houses to be blue (like the sky) and that is the look we are after.

flooring and painting and doors, oh my

We've almost made it through the summer! It's actually been okay without AC because of our daily ritual of opening all of the windows for about an hour each night or early morning to get cool air into the house. The foam core panel construction retains most of the coolness until about 4pm or so. If we manage to get in this routine when we actually start living there again we'll be able to save big bucks on airconditioning, hopefully.

Today I'll be putting on a second coat of paint in my blue bass room. Tomorrow I'll be using that room to paint all of the upstairs doors that we installed this week, and then I'll install the flooring, which means that the painting and flooring in the upstairs will be completely finished! Of course we still have to do the baseboards and window and door trim, but whatever.

In preparation for the flooring in the blue room, Doug had to do a little remedial work on the subfloor to make it perfectly level. He used various pieces of wood that we have around right now to accomplish this and then he sanded it all flat. It was a grueling, tedious, and messy job, but he got it done. I love the fact that he used bead board for part of it. So fancy! But it's all going to be covered up in another day or two.

We hung the mirror in the pink bathroom. It goes pretty well with the lights and the faucet handles.

The electrician was here for a couple weeks installing all of the light fixtures and switches.

Early on in the lighting selection process I had no idea what I liked or wanted. My frame of mind was still in the stage where I was resenting the fact that I had to pick out lights at all. Anyway, I found a couple of bargains that didn't work out where I had originally intended for them to go, so we just put them in the various rooms upstairs. They look slightly on the flamboyant side for their locations, but they were cheap and we already had them.

Above is the green bedroom. The color didn't photograph very well - it's a little bit more of a deeper and clearer green than you see here. It looks really fresh and I liked it so much that I painted our closet below the same color. It looks very different during the day in the two rooms because of the natural light, but I really like it in both of them.

I finally figured out what to do with the gigantic tambour unit we got that was the wrong size for the kitchen. We hung it in the middle of the wall in our closet and we're going to hang double closet rods on either side of it. Doug and Cyndy's clothing will be well separated, which is excellent!

I got a chest of drawers from Ikea to slide in underneath which is just the right size, and I'll be able to close those tambour doors to hide the clutter. And the inside is divided down the middle which wouldn't have worked at all in our kitchen, but now we each have our own compartment for stuff. So we are definitely making lemonade from this situation. The color below is a little distorted - the real green is actually about halfway between this photo and the one above. I never thought I'd end up with such a colorful closet - it's pretty ridiculous, but also ridiculously pretty.

Also this week, Doug installed the front porch railings that I had finished painting a while back. But he didn't install the balls. I'm not posting an outside picture of his beautiful railing work until he gets those balls up.

So there!

Help me decide...blue chimney or yellow chimney?

BEFORE

We had this ugly vent pipe coming up from our microwave/range hood that needed to be covered. Originally we were going to surround it with drywall so it would have been yellow to match the walls. But then I got the bright idea of making a "chimney" for it that could be removed if necessary. I designed it and Doug made out of the beadboard and various mouldings that I had selected. I painted it to match the cabinets and I think it looks nice, but it might look even better if it matched the wall instead. That way there would be a nice horizontal line of color all the way around the tops of the cabinets. What do you think? I can't make up my mind. I guess I could always just paint it and find out. If you feel like it, leave me a comment with your opinion. Thanks!

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER, AS IT IS NOW

AFTER, IF IT WERE CHANGED TO YELLOW
(awesome photoshopping by Gene )

Speaking of nice even horizontal lines at the tops of the cabinets, the always gracious Kathy Schmick at Smoot Lumber came through for us once again. We installed the replacement cabinet for the too tall one that the cabinet company had sent and it looks so much better with the heights matching all the way around the kitchen. Unfortunately it's kind of hard to tell from this picture because we had to take out the refrigerator in preparation for coating the floor with a fancy super-dooper flooring protector called Bona Traffic. And the room is still kind of a mess because we're not finished with everything yet. But it's coming along.....

REPLACEMENT CABINET IN THE CORNER BY THE WINDOW

Oh, and I noticed that my cabinet color is very similar to Julia Child's kitchen cabinets in Julie and Julia, which I saw today. Isn't that nice? Maybe I'll take up French cooking as my next new hobby after I get tired of homebuilding. Oh wait, that's already happened. The cooking's probably also going to have to wait a couple more months.

Flooring Progress

I spent most of last week painting the front porch railings and Doug finally finished the sections that curve around to meet the stair railings. They are really cute and clever and as soon as they're up I'll post a picture. I still have to paint them so I'll be doing that as soon as my knees recover from the flooring work we did over the weekend.


We completely finished the living/dining room and the kitchen. Doug also took care of some of the cabinet details that were related to the flooring. I did most of the measuring and cutting with the mighty miter saw. Our white oak floating floor is by Kahrs, for anyone who happens to be interested, and it comes in 8 foot lengths that sometimes snap together and other times need to be encouraged with a chunk of wood and a hammer. I dubbed Doug the "floor whisperer" because whenever I couldn't get a piece of flooring to fit together easily, he would come over, kneel down, and do some magic wiggling between the two floor pieces until they obeyed. Then I would walk down the length to flatten out the seam. While Doug was working in the kitchen I would cut the lengths for him and also slip in a few pieces in the living room. We ended up finishing both rooms at about the same time.

Tomorrow I'll wrap up a few painting details and hopefully get started on the Bona Traffic polyurethane coating for the kitchen floor. I'll be happy to get back to some low impact activities after all of the wood banging I was engaged in over the weekend.*

THE MIGHTY MITER SAW

LIVING ROOM

KITCHEN

*I'm quite aware that the more crude among you might be somewhat entertained by my choice of words. Go ahead, be entertained. You'll certainly be having more fun than I did!

foam core reality

I often feel like a hypocrite writing this mostly happy little blog about all of the wonderful experiences that we've had since we began building Doug's fantasy house. Now I know full well that I have been a participant in this venture, and in spite of the fact that I never ever thought it was realistic, it is as much my house as it is his and so it is as much my problem as it is his. It always has been.

I know that Doug believes with all of his heart that he wanted to do this for me and for us, or so he says, but the truth is I didn't want to do it this way for a number of really important and practical reasons. It has always made me feel uncomfortable. The fancy things in this house are inappropriate for our income level, especially considering the fact that Doug's insistence that we do it ourselves has enormously reduced both of our incomes. I've been absolutely miserable not being able to work the kinds of gigs I used to do. I loved my life before this house fiasco began. I feel like I've been sentenced to hard labor for three years - so far.

When we were deciding what to do way back in the fall of 2005, I wanted to have the insurance company do the normal thing, which would be to restore our house - that's what they were going to do. They said it would take six months. Our house was nearly completely paid for so we could have used a home equity loan to cover the additional costs of bringing the basement up to code and to get our addition finished in a minimal and affordable kind of way. And by hiring professionals to do the work, however sloppy that might have ended up being, as least we could get back on track as quickly as possible. It seemed to me to be the most reasonable way to deal with the aftermath of the fire.

We had a very nice life together before the fire. We both had gigs doing what we loved most - playing nearly every night and travelling. But we disagreed about what should be done about the house. I felt very uneasy about Doug's plan. I didn't want my old house to go away - I wanted it to be repaired, which the insurance company expected to do. His plan involved a lot of work for him, I mean us. I had just finished painting the exterior of our house a couple of months before the fire. It was not as much work as the first time I did it, but it was still pretty exhausting. I wasn't in the mood to do more, and why should I be? I'd rather live in an apartment than paint another house. I knew from years of experience how Doug's projects never seemed to get finished for one reason or another. And I knew that ultimately Doug would never be satisfied with anyone else's work.

I found myself not really trusting that it would work out with the two builders we attempted to use and I'm quite unhappy to say that I was right. I didn't enjoy thinking we were headed for financial disaster as we planned, well mostly I planned, this absurdly lavish house full of all kinds of ridiculous and amazing things that neither of us had ever had or needed before.

Doug, not surprisingly, was completely overwhelmed on a daily basis by all of the unnecessary complexities of being tour manager, a job we had mutually decided would be unwise for him to do again considering everything else we were suddenly having to deal with. It was impossible to talk sense into him when he made the decision after that, while I was away for several months, to be tour manager again after all.

So you can probably imagine how it went whenever I tried to suggest a more conservative plan for our house while we were out on the road that fall. He was so stressed out once again by all of his various duties that he wasn't able to seriously consider that it might be better in this particular situation to be practical and unambitious for once. He basically told me that what I wanted was not an option. "That's just how it is - we have no other choice." Nice.

So I gave up and went along with him and his fancy ideas. I hated myself for feeling so negative about "our" dream house. On the other hand I didn't feel like it was appropriate for us to have a dream house. Just a plain old house would have been fine with me. One that we could live in sooner rather than later.

I've always been completely happy living in a hotel or a cruise ship cabin. But since it seemed that I apparently had no idea that we could afford all this, or even how little time it would take, I decided that I would attempt to disguise my feelings of negativity as much as I possibly could and just devote myself to this lovely project known as Foam Core Fantasy until it drives itself into the ground. And I guess that is what this little blog is all about.

finally back to work

Not much has happened over at the house since I last posted back in March. I thought we'd get back to it as soon as I finished school, but alas, my whip-cracking attempts were in vain. That has been rather discouraging for the past month.

Finally this past week we have resumed work and I'm very pleased with what we have accomplished. I think what got things moving again was the fact that our replacement cabinet arrived and we needed to take down the one that was too big so that we could put the new one in.

It's pretty clear to me now what needs to be done when and in what order. If we actually see each little project through to the end instead of just flitting around, things will begin to seem like they are leading in a particular direction, in other words, our house might eventually be finished.

So this week I have been buying moulding and painting it and Doug has been measuring and cutting. It's been nice to ease back into working on the house without killing ourselves. We'll do some more of that later I'm sure.

Here are a few pictures that show some of the more recent developments. I found these two old leaded glass windows at an antique store for pretty cheap and they fit nicely into the pass-through and let a little more light in to our somewhat shady kitchen. Doug installed them and put the trim around the outside and I painted them.


I think we managed to get a sort of "old house" look by adding them in. You can click on the picture below to see the trim details. Doug did a really good job assembling it. I'm very happy with the way it looks and especially with the fact that it is finished!

This is the old too-tall cabinet. It's really nice, but it's HUGE and it was a different size from what we ordered. They don't want it back so we are going to try to figure out whether we can use it somewhere else. That yellow stripe is a packing strap so the doors wouldn't open while we were carrying it upstairs.

I don't know why my camera makes all of these colors look more vivid than they actually are. The upstairs certainly looks bright and cheery! It is, but not this bright. This is looking down the hall from our oh-so-purple bedroom. The purple is really not as scary as it looks here. The color actually changes and looks good in all different kinds of light.

The lights on the ceiling of our bathroom are kind of cool looking.

The lights on the wall don't match the ceiling lights at all, but they still look good together so it works out.

I just love my little round laundry room sink. It is the perfect depth for washing things by hand.

Next time I hope to have some pictures of the new kitchen cabinet that Doug installed today. It looks so much better now that the height matches the cabinets in the rest of the room.